Commentary

This past summer I embarked on my first foray into agriculture on a small piece of land in Waterbury. While I took some time to get settled, by mid-season I was attending a farmers’ market, selling to various restaurants and stores, and maintaining a small farm stand.

With both hands, I reach into the crate of chickens. “I’m sorry!” I say to the chicken as it flaps in my less-than-confident grasp. The butcher just showed me how to properly handle a bird: two hands on their legs, chest down, and pick up. They won’t flap this way. I put the bird’s chest on the ground until it calms and hand it to the butcher.

Three summers ago, Jacob and I moved back to Vermont from the southeastern corner of Idaho. Tired of the long Teton Valley winter, we’d stared longingly at the March photo on our Vermont Life calendar: a tractor crawling along its farm beneath Mount Mansfield.

At a wedding last summer, I sat next to a neighbor who buys her Thanksgiving turkey from our farm. She described her daily drive-by dose of the farm, and her ritual of slowing down to see where the goats, pigs, and poultry had been moved. She said, “I’ve gotten to the point I think I should pay a toll to pass your place!” I joked, “In order for us to survive it might come to that!” The conversation awkwardly fell off. But it has preoccupied me since.

As Cynthea Wight Hausman was growing up—first on a commune in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and later on her family’s New Hampshire homestead—fresh and organic foods were plentiful. In her teens, Cynthea made her own remedies and lotions from herbs and flowers gathered from the woods and gardens surrounding her home.

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Our stories, interviews, and essays reveal how Vermont residents are building their local food systems, how farmers are faring in a time of great opportunity and challenge, and how Vermont’s agricultural landscape ties into larger questions of sustainability and the future of our food supply.